Of course, Gmail's search ability is pretty great (consider the parent company). If you decide not to label messages, finding what you need is still easy. But why limit yourself to one way to find things?

When you do a search in Gmail, don't stick to text. Use operators to narrow things down. They include from:, to:, subject:, label:, list: (for mailing lists), filename: (for specific attachments), and quotation marks to find specific phrases. Gmail Help has a list of useful operators.

All the terms you search on are grouped by default with the AND Boolean operator; if you need to find only one of your terms, put an OR in between them. Putting terms in curly brackets like this: {from:eric subject:hashtags} will also mimic the OR operation. Then you can pair that set with required terms in the search. Likewise, search terms encased in parentheses are forced to use AND. So you can execute complicated searches of your inbox, like this:

(to: (Dan Jeremy Lance) subject: {hashtags twitter})

That would find all messages to Dan, Lance, and Jeremy that have either "hashtags" or "twitter" in the subject line.

Filters modify messages as they arrive (just as Rules do in Outlook). The primary change is applying labels based on criteria that you set. You can also filter items so they're marked as read, archived (meaning they move out of your inbox), deleted, or forwarded to other addresses based on who the message is from, the subject line, or any words included or absent from the message body. Use the parentheses (or AND) or curly brackets (or OR) in your filter criteria as well.

Other Boolean operators you can use: a minus sign (-) in front of something you don't want to show up in a search/filter (such as -from:Jeremy to avoid all e-mails from that guy, or -from:*@pcmag.com to avoid all PCMag.com e-mails). Put multiple domain names styled like that in curly brackets and they're all ignored.

A search in Gmail includes the archives, so there's no reason not to use filters and labels to keep that inbox extra clean.

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY.
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